


drift anchor

by arbitrarily



Category: Bloodline (TV 2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-20 12:13:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3649932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i> In order to survive a hurricane, one should first prepare a family disaster plan. In order to survive a hurricane, do not look it in the eye. </i> </p><p>Danny comes home; Meg never left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drift anchor

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through the first season.

 

 

 _this place is vile,_  
_and i’m vile too_.  
WAXAHATCHEE

 

 

 

 

 

 

“ – he grabbed the grilling fork and he stuck it in your grandfather’s throat … He told me, he had two little holes in his throat,  
like he’d been bit by a rattlesnake. We used to laugh about that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

four siblings, one raised by wolves

 

 

 

i.

The only thing Danny has ever been generous with is his mouth.

Kevin got married in late August, the ceremony bogged down by damp humidity and the threat of rain, the weekend smack in the middle of hurricane season. All anyone had talked about in preparation for the wedding had been weather patterns and past storms, a collection of names said as bad omens: Wilma and Jeanne and Frances and Andrew.

And then, Danny.

Danny arrived in the middle of the rehearsal dinner, when the sky did finally break. Sally said it was a good sign, rain the night before a wedding, but Sally had that optimistic way of twisting all actual and unwanted events into something that could be read only as good. She had a way of lying without it ever appearing as such. 

Danny was the opposite: everything that spilled from him sounded patently untrue. A falsified record as an unearned fabulist. 

He gave a toast at the reception the following evening. He had raised a hand as he stood; “I know, I know, it’s the best man’s duty, but grant a big brother some love here.” When he laughed, low and rumbling, just like the thunder that had passed overhead the night before, that threatened to come again uninvited, the reception took it as permission and laughed too. Danny had glanced first at John and then at Kevin, offered both of them a salute.

“Nothing personal,” Kevin had told him after he named John his best man. Danny had grinned, shark teeth and hooded eyes: “It never is,” he’d said.

“It’s always nice, times like this, when we can get the whole clan back together. The whole Rayburn family, under one roof, gathered here today to honor the future, rather than the past.” He looked to their father and their father looked back. Danny cleared his throat. Meg didn’t mean to: she held her breath. 

“My baby brother! Never thought he’d see the day, or is that what everyone says about me? I’m projecting, forgive me. But, here’s Kevin, and here’s his wife – Belle, Belle, beautiful Belle, belle of the ball, belle of the major league, way outside my baby brother’s … but, well, I suppose the same could be said of any sober and lovely woman, isn’t that right?” Nervous laughter traveled amongst the tables. Meg looked down at her hand holding her flute of champagne, peered quickly up at Danny. His tone was light, amused. Seated beside his bride, Kevin glowered. 

“To future happiness,” Danny said, his drink raised. His lips spread, his smile barbed and predatory.

“And to another Rayburn.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

For a wedding gift, Danny gave Kevin and Belle a set of incredibly expensive and incredibly sharp kitchen knives. The card read: 

_good luck._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

During the week leading up to the inn’s 45th anniversary party, Meg runs errands for her mother. She folds napkins. She looks over the seating arrangements. She makes place cards, her handwriting neat and legible. 

She listens to her mother try to convince her to get married. 

“I know it’s what your father really wants, his little girl, settled and set. And with your brother coming down,” Sally is saying, “it’d make for such a beautiful time for an announcement.”

“Mom, I promise you? Danny doesn’t care.”

Sally clucks her tongue, shakes her head. “Always so tough on your brother.” She reaches a hand out and smoothes it down Meg’s bare arm. “He cares. Of course he cares, Meg.”

She holds up a pale blue tablecloth. “Now, this? Or the white?”

Less than a week later, Danny will corner Meg in her own house and he will say, “You don’t have to marry Marco.”

Their mother is right: of course he fucking cares. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

Danny’s funeral is unbearably small. 

After, that night, Meg sits alone on the porch at the inn, her knees pulled to her chest. She listens to the waves, the breeze in the palms that makes them rustle restlessly, the lawn dark. She’ll return to New York in the morning.

John joins her, a heavy sigh as he sits. 

“Mom’s in bed.”

“Good,” she says, but she does not look at him. The silence between them isn’t a quiet at all, too full of too many things that have gone unsaid for far too long, recriminations bumping against one another, begging to be addressed. 

“I was talking to Kevin earlier,” he finally says. “And he said to me, he said, it’s like we’re finally free of him now. And I wanted to laugh, because – ” he pauses. She can feel him looking at her. “It’s been days, but I gotta tell you: I can’t stop looking over my shoulder. I keep waiting and waiting, expecting him to find me. To come back, creep up on me – _gotcha._ ” He lunges forward at the the word and then relaxes back into the wicker chair. “I mean, if anyone was gonna cheat death, it was gonna be Danny.”

Meg doesn’t say anything. Her chin bumps against her knee.

“And, y’know,” John says, “I keep thinking – Danny was right. He got what he fucking wanted. I’m gonna live the rest of my life with this. It’s never gonna stop.”

Meg looks out across the lawn. 

“John,” she says. From this far back, you can’t see the water. You can’t see the boat moored to the dock. She can’t tell him: of course Danny was right.

She turns to face him, her body unfurling, her gaze flat and her mouth mean.

“That’s family,” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

She had hoped he’d never come back here.

Sometimes, it’s like the Rayburns aren’t a family at all, but rather a coalition, a business, assembled without their consent. They are coworkers, tasked with the same boss, the only reason they belong to one another arbitrary and their tenuous connection could be broken at will. 

Danny never looked anything like her and John. Meg and John got the dark features from their father’s mother (of whom all remained was a small worn photograph, a stern face belied by dark squinting eyes and a flat mouth trying to smile), while Danny got the freckles and the bright blue eyes. Danny took after their mother, that same painful openness finding its way onto their faces in their more vulnerable moments. 

There is one photo on the wall of Sally. She is young in the photograph and she looks like Danny at that age. Her gaze is aimed past the photographer, her hair light, those wide almost frightened light blue eyes, freckles across her nose and on her face. Like a deer luring – or is the word daring? or are a dare and are a lure the same idea expressed with different sounds and differing levels of seduction and threat? – you and your headlights to try and catch sight of her.

Look at all that hurt waiting there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

She had hoped he’d never come back, but he did.

Rain drives against the side of the inn. John had called and said _I’m on my way_ , Meg and Kevin had hidden two million dollars worth of cocaine, Danny had come back. In the front hall the lights flicker.

“What have you been doing, Danny?” she asks him. 

He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to. The corners of his mouth tip up but he isn’t smiling. 

He goes to touch her, and she recoils. “Don’t touch me. Never touch me again,” she says, and he looks at her, looks at her like he knows each and every thing inside of her, all the parts that hold her together and keep her upright. Like only he knows how to take that all apart. Only he knows how to break her.

He touches her anyway, the back of his hand skimming down her rain-soaked arm. She shivers. He notices.

“What could you possibly have to give me anyway,” he says, aching and low. They’re in their mother’s house. Their father is dead. Their brothers will be here soon. 

He starts to walk away.

“You draw those papers up yet?” he calls back to her. He does not wait for her reply. 

This is the last time Meg is alone with Danny while he is still alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

This family is good at playing favorites. 

If asked, she has always said that John is her favorite brother. It’s a responsible choice.

In practice, it’s Kevin who is her favorite, always there for a drink at any and all open bars at any and all hours, open with his problems in a way that makes her own feel slight and manageable, the way you hold onto friends you might have long outgrown, appreciative of how they put your life in perspective.

In her heart – that place Marco tells her in his more frustrated and crueler moments does not exist, that cold, dark place Alec asks after, whispers in her ear, _let me in_ , as if he thinks he might find it between her legs – she knows it’s Danny. 

It’s always been Danny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the apiary

 

 

 

i.

Meg drives. She toys with the dial, avoids the talk radio stations, skips anything that sounds like country – “Delay for the Rayburn pier dedication – ” she turns the radio off. She drags her fingers through her hair, tilts the vents towards her but the cool air’s not enough, so she rolls the windows down. She thinks she’s learned to hate this place; her neck is sweaty, Danny’s been back less than a week, it’s all shit anyway, it’s all going to shit, nothing is enough.

She goes to the gym, she does pricey yoga and spin classes three or four times a week. She goes to swanky local boutiques after, buys overpriced bikinis and equally expensive sundresses to throw over them. She gets her nails done. She goes to the office and in the back file room old papers and briefs mold and dampen. She drinks gin instead of wine with her mother and her sisters-in-law. She drives. She goes to the gym, mouths along to popular songs she knows the wrong words to, old songs she knows some of the words to, sweat collects along the back of her neck, drips down and around her shoulders, her chest, _set me free, why don’t you, babe_ , 1.22 miles, she can go further, so she does, she runs, she drives, her thighs burn, her breath catches, she can smell her sweat, the remnants of sunscreen and stale perfume, _why don’t you be a man and set me free, now you don’t care a thing about me_ , pushes harder, hates it’s not enough, hates this fucking place, _get out, get out of my life_.

She drives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

The Overseas Highway is a 127.5 mile highway that carries US Route 1 down through the Florida Keys, ending in Key West. It is called the Highway that Goes to Sea. It can be traversed in less than four hours. Large parts of it were built on the remains of the Overseas Railroad, the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway. The railway was completed in 1912 but heavily damaged and partially destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.

The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 made direct landfall at Islamorada. 423 people died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

The pier dedication is tomorrow. John’s gone home with Diana and Kevin’s at the boathouse. Meg’s in the kitchen of their parents’ house with Danny. 

It’s impossible with Danny sometimes. It always feels like each and every moment with him is permanent. Nothing can be erased and nothing will be forgotten, and because of this nothing can be forgiven. Not by him.

“I see the menu at the Inn’s still the same,” he says. 

“Yup,” she says. “It is.” She towel-dries a clean plate from the dishwasher and begins to stack them. 

“Dad still refusing to change it, huh?” His tone is light enough, but she knows him better than that. Manipulation is Danny’s default setting and whatever he is trying to get at, she’s not interested.  

“You left. You don’t get to be mad about how we live our lives without you,” Meg says, equal parts calm and patronizing, as she continues to empty the dishwasher.

Danny is seated behind her at the kitchen island, his body bent and slouched forward as he drinks his beer. She can feel him watching her. She wipes off another glass and puts it in the cupboard. 

She looks at him over her shoulder. “I hear you’ve been seeing Chelsea.”

Kevin had been the one to tell her. It had taken a beat for her to even recall who Chelsea O’Bannon was. “From high school?” she’d said to Kevin, and he’d shrugged, said: “From other things too, probably.”

“She’s Eric’s sister. Goes with the territory.” 

Meg leans back against the counter, arms crossed over her chest. 

“You only like her because she isn’t one of us.”

He laughs. “Baby, that’d mean I love the whole goddamn world then, huh?”

She snorts, shelves a glass, reaches for another.

“Marco,” she hears him say, the name drawn long and loose as if he is trying it on.

“We’re not engaged,” Meg says.

“I know. I heard you the first time,” he says, far too casual.  

Meg drops the damp towel on the counter.  

“Do you know what Marco’s family is like?” she asks, quiet. She bends, her elbows propped against the island across from Danny. She tells him about Marco’s family. Their easy warmth, the fucking picnics and the kids and the tortillas and the cheap cans of lemon-lime soda his abuela has sent from her sister still in Monterrey. They only tell good stories and even if they are bad stories, they’re stories with happy endings. They tell these stories with smiles on their faces and they laugh and they love each other, open and unafraid. 

Danny leans forward, his hands clasped together, close to hers. “Yeah, but you’re still outside it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shakes his head. He studies her. 

“Nothing’s that good once you’re in it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

This is what Meg remembers of Danny growing up:

He read _A Wrinkle In Time_ to her on the back porch of the Inn the summer she was six. Sarah was still alive and the boys would spend their nights rough-housing with her out on the lawn and into the water until their mother called Sarah in, dragging her up to bed against her wishes. In the mornings, Danny would read to Meg, just the two of them, the morning heat closing in as she turned the pages for him.

He showed up to her high school graduation unexpectedly, twenty-seven years old and stoned out of his mind. He had harassed her boyfriend at the party after. They had broken up by the end of that week, but that, she thought, had nothing to do with Danny. 

He taught her how to make paella when she was home one summer from college. He was home too, in need of cash he had yet to ask for, and in the midst of killing time, he had taught her how to make paella. She replicated it for every man she dated since then, but it never tasted as good.

Danny used to test how long she could hold her breath. He’d push her head underwater, the salt stinging her eyes, squeezed tight and shut, bubbles escaping first her nose and then her mouth before she remembered it was smarter to save that. She could only last forty-five seconds before her chest began to ache. He only played that game with her until Sarah died. She remembers being eight, maybe, Danny about to graduate high school. They were out in the waves, and she had grabbed his wrist, pulled his hand to the top of her head and set it there. She sank under the water, pulling his hand with her. He didn’t push, he merely held. She only stayed under for the count of twenty-one before he had hauled her up, first painfully by the hair and then under her arms, cursing at her in a way she thought was reserved solely for Kevin.

He taught her to drive the boat. She was thirteen. Their father met them at the dock when they came back in, sunburnt and waterlogged. Robert had cuffed Danny on the ear and Danny was dragging his duffel bag down the stairs by dinner. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v. 

Meg drops their mother at home from the hospital. Danny is waiting in the kitchen. 

“Mama,” he says, and their mother kisses Danny on the crown of his head. Meg waits in the dark of the hall. 

“Stay a minute?” Danny says to her as Sally climbs the stairs to bed. The offer is friendly enough, but Meg watches him carefully as she steps into the light of the kitchen. She watches his face, waits to see it change. It will, she knows it will. 

Ever since he came by her place – that motel room keycard in his hand, faux pity for Marco, that single-minded beat inside him that cried out against disinheritance – he pulls her aside sometimes. Reminds her of what they talked about. He knows she didn’t forget.

“Look,” she says, “I’m gonna talk to Dad once he’s out of the hospital, okay?” 

He crosses his arms over his chest. “And she cuts right to the chase.” 

“Maybe,” he says, “I just wanted to spend time with my sister.”

“Don’t do that.”

He raises an eyebrow, clearly offended. “What?”

She shakes her head slightly, her mouth sad. “I never know if you mean a thing you say.”

He doesn’t have anything to say about that, and for just a beat she feels guilty. She can’t help but see Danny as equal parts depraved and vulnerable – a bleeding wound you can’t help but feel some responsibility in inflecting, some fear of reciprocity.

He leans against the kitchen doorframe, crowds her space. His hip bumps against the hand she has braced against the jamb. She doesn’t move; she can feel the heat of him through the thin cotton of his shirt, she never knows if he means a thing he says.

“You know,” he says, his head tipped down to hers, mouth barely moving, “in my travels, I’ve picked up a thing or two. And you know what I realized? It’s only here – ” he pauses, shakes his head. “Any other place, this family wouldn’t be shit. No one would give a fuck about the Rayburns.”

“Then why do you care so much if you’re a part of it.”

He looks down at her and she looks at him. There’s nothing in his face she wants to read. He moves that much closer, heat and flesh and muscle shift against her hand, the ridge of her knuckles. 

“That’s what you think I want?” He says it low, his voice as if scraped over rough gravel. And there it is: the change in him. He’s always been mercurial, able to turn on a dime, but she thinks maybe that’s not entirely true. The truth is that he’s all still waters, dark depths, and it’s not him that reveals himself but Meg who becomes willing to see him for what he really is: sinister and opportunistic and a part of her.

He almost, she thinks, sounds disappointed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

The average person can hold their breath for three to four minutes.

Drowning, they say, is a relatively quick and silent process. 

The body’s instinctive response to drowning is noiseless and seemingly calm. Arms and legs work under the water to get the mouth to the surface. This instinct takes place for typically no longer than the final twenty to sixty seconds during drowning and before sinking underwater. 

“It is a matter of _seconds._ ”

Meg had learned all that the summer she worked as a lifeguard at the Islamorada Club pool. She had been fifteen and she had been in love with their instructor, a perfectly tanned college student who summered with his family in the Keys. He did not love her back.

Days when the pool was empty, Meg would jump in, screw her eyes shut, float down, down, down, down, count, slow and methodical, _one, two, three_ , imagine she was stuck, imagine she was under, _fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,_ imagine she was her sister, imagine she was Sarah, _thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two_ , imagine her brother held her under, imagine him down here with her, _fifty-three, fifty-four_ , wait, wait, wait for the burn, wait for panic, wait for that crackle of adrenaline, that first breath at the surface as she’d gasp and kick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

christ of the abyss

 

 

 

i.

“You lied.”

“What?” she says, one clipped syllable. She drops her bag of groceries on the counter. She doesn’t want to know how long he waited for her on her front step. 

“About the will,” he says.

Their father has been dead three days. 

“I suppose I could always contest it, now that I’m left out of it.” He speaks too casually, like he’s trying to lull her into the bear trap he has waiting under a pile of dead leaves. “There’s gotta be rules about that sort of thing, right? A beneficiary of a will drafting the will in question. That might be what they call undue influence.”

“It’s not,” she says. He ignores her. He, he says, thinks a probate court would be sympathetic to his exclusion.

“Can you imagine? The Rayburn clan, a house – no, an _inn_ – divided. Father Robert went and disowned his eldest son, and his lawyer daughter was the one to do it. Now, I’m hardly an expert on ethics, or the law, for that matter, but I do know what a conflict of interest looks like, and, Mister, you got yourself one right here, filed in Papa Ray’s name.”  

Even with him dead, their father looms over them. 

“Where do you think you’d get yourself a lawyer?”

He shrugs. “Got any recommendations? I can tell them you sent me.”

“You won’t. You won’t do this.”

He smiles at her. “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything I might do. That’s the real trouble, isn’t it?” Danny, she thinks, wields threats the way most people offer platitudes: with dulled kindness and scattershot intent.

Meg storms over to the bookshelf and yanks a volume down. She rifles through the already marked pages. 

The Rules Regulating the Florida Bar, she says to him.

Rule 4-1.8(c): does not permit an attorney to prepare an instrument for a client which gives the attorney or a person related to the attorney a substantial gift unless the recipient of the gift is related to the client.

Now, she says, unless you’re planning to prove I’m not a Rayburn.

No, he says, I’d never question whether you are our father’s daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

“Oh, Sunshine,” their father says. He looks at her and he shakes his head.

This is the last thing he says to her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

Meg keeps her financials in order. She makes good money. She owns her place. She has cash put aside, labeled “for D.R.” Just in case. You never know. Someday he’ll ask for it and she likes the idea of being ready.

If Kevin knew, he’d probably kill her. If their father knew, he would.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

“You can’t disown Danny,” she told her father.

He was seated at his desk, the plantation shutters open, the afternoon sun struggling to fill his dark office.

“It’s shameful,” he said, and he shook his head. “My youngest daughter coming to me, defending my eldest son. He should be ashamed.” He did not say, _and so should you_ , but it was there, in the room with them.

She took a seat across from him. “He doesn’t know. Dad, Danny didn’t ask me to.”

“No? Not yet then.”

Meg looked down at her hands, at the chipped pale pink polish, her hands tanned and old looking to her. 

“He’s family,” she finally said. “He’s your son. He’s my brother.”

“Yes,” their father said, old and sad and furious as he’d always been, “our mutual cross to bear.”

And, as she had always done, after finding only disappointment with her father, Meg went to her mother.

“Mom? Mom,” she said, trying to get her attention. Sally was in the kitchen. She was making a fruit salad. “What do you know about – did you know Dad’s planning to cut Danny out of the will?”

Sally cocked her head towards Meg. “What? Don’t be silly.” She shook her head, looked down instead of at Meg. She raised her hand and shook her head again, dismissive. “That’s all talk. You know how he is. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Look at these mangoes,” she said, and she returned to slicing them, the fruit overripe and soft, juice spreading sticky under her hand and under her knife. 

“He sounded pretty serious to me. Mom. Are you listening?”

Sally waved her off. When she looked at Meg her eyes were clear. “What’s the hurry? Your father is fine and I’m fine and will, no will – no one’s dying and no one’s rushing and no one’s hurting. Nothing is ever lost.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

Their father dies.

“At the service,” Danny says to her after the funeral, “I overheard this lady, little old biddy, and she says, silver linings – at least Robert’s with his Sarah now.”

Meg’s face pulls tight. “Okay.” A pause extends. Her beer’s gone warm but she throws back the rest of it. 

“You think that’s true? Because, see, I think you’ve gotta buy into several implausible conceits to believe any of that shit. The first being, that there’s even an afterlife to begin with. The second – that in this afterlife that may or may not exist, there is a heaven and there’s a hell, and that brings us to the third, and most improbable: in this potential afterlife, where you’ve got a heaven and you’ve got a hell, our father and our Sarah could possibly wind up in same place.”

“Stop it, Danny.” She needs another beer. She goes to the fridge, grabs one for herself and one for Danny, wordlessly passes it to him across the table. 

“A nice thought though, isn’t it? Dad and his angel, reunited at last.” His face darkens. He considers his bottle of beer, considers the one in her hand and then only her hand, her arm, travels up to her face. “Maybe that’s all it would’ve taken him, all these years, to forgive me."

“What?” Faint horror colors her voice. He stares back at her.

“To die.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

Danny’s weight is heavy against her. He stinks of cheap bourbon and stale cigarettes, and she half-drags, half-pulls him into her house. 

It’s two weeks before he dies. 

“You’re so good,” he says, mean and mocking, and his knees knock into her couch. “Do whatever John Boy tells you to do.”

She doesn’t know what he means. “He said get you home and you needed to get home, don’t make it a thing.”

He snorts, can barely hold his head up. She loops an arm around his shoulder and props his head back up. 

“Don’t puke,” she tells him, and he laughs, loose and easy. He presses his open mouth to the inside of her wrist. She jerks her arm away, and when he laughs this time it sounds like a lazy, but hungry, dog’s snarl.

She gets him sprawled out on the couch. He raises a hand to point at her, but instead he just lets the hand fall against her bare arm, his grip loose. She does not pull away this time.

“You lied,” and he says like a knowing accusation. “Because he told you to lie.”

“What are you talking about?” she whispers. “Danny?” She prods his shoulder and he grunts. He is still holding her wrist. 

“You’d be so much happier,” he mumbles, and then he stops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

Here is a truth: this family does not discuss its past. Here is another: Meg has lived her entire life believing misdirections she took for easy truths. 

Here is what she never wanted to know: their father and his fists and Danny’s teenage body, his shoulder popped out at the wrong angle, their father screaming, Danny silent, blood smeared over his mouth.

“Who told us to lie?” she asks Kevin; he supposes they just knew. 

She finds Danny out in the parking lot outside the Inn. He has his back to her. 

“Danny.”

“What?” he sighs when he says it, turning to face her. He’s sober and soft and manageable. She doesn’t trust it.

“I didn’t know. Back, when we were kids. I didn’t know, what had happened. I didn’t know that Dad – I didn’t know we lied.”

He nods. “Sure, Mister.”

Meg steps towards him. “Danny, I’m sorry.”

He smiles quick, but his eyes are sad, a cigarette hanging from him mouth. He nods again. “Okay, then.” He turns, as if to walk away.

“You have to forgive us. We’ve all gotta move on. We have to.”

His gaze drops. He flicks the cigarette onto the gravel drive. When he looks up his face has changed – craggy and hardened in the parking lot light. He steps forward. She takes a deep breath. She thinks: he’s a stranger. She thinks: I don’t know this man at all. He’s built of different parts than me, he came from somewhere else. There’s nothing that we share.

But that would be a lie, too.

He squeezes her shoulders and she doesn’t move. His arms drop. He smells like cigarettes and saltwater.

He looks down at her, not unkindly.

“We don’t do that in this family,” he says. And then he smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the art of controlled violence

 

 

 

i.

After her first year at law school, Meg came down to visit before she started a summer internship at a firm in Miami. She talked with their father in his office. She doesn’t remember what was said. She remembers she was lonely and empty and sad as she left his office, as she walked past the wall of family photographs. 

Danny had been in town, too. He wanted money, or at least that was what Kevin and their father said, what John wouldn’t admit, what their mother never cared to see. Meg hadn’t cared why he was there. She wandered up the stairs to the guest room, rapped gently on the door. She pushed it open when he called, “Yeah?” 

Danny was laid out on top of the covers, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The ceiling fan was too lazy to create any breeze, the heat was stifling, the bedside lamp still on. 

Meg didn’t say anything. She shut the door behind her. She toed her sandals off and crawled onto the bed with him. She tucked her hair behind her ear and rested her head on his chest. He wrapped an arm around her, lazily dragged his fingers through her sweat-damp hair. 

“Hi ya, Mister.”

“Hey,” she said and took his cigarette from his mouth. She thought it was too warm to smoke, but she inhaled anyway, her mouth sticky, skin sticky, stuck to his, and he took the cigarette back from her without a word.  

“You don’t have to get your law degree, you know,” he said after awhile. He always had that way of knowing what she was thinking, what she refused to admit she was thinking. 

“I want to,” she whispered.

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know what else I’d want.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

“What have you been doing, Danny?”

She asks like she doesn’t want to know, not really. She’s relieved when he lies. 

“Nothing,” he says. He holds his hands open and empty. “Not a goddamn thing, Mister.”

He will be dead in two days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii. 

Meg grew up untouchable. Meg was too little, too female, too much of an afterthought. Without Sarah, she became both more prized and more forgotten. Like an expensive gift received and rather than ever use it or take it out, out of fear and something else, that lack of gratitude for the gift itself, you keep it tucked away. So Meg read and her brothers fought and when she became old enough to learn outside validation would always be easier to find and achieve than anything within her father’s house, she did just that. She was validated. 

Her brothers would fight, constantly, growing bodies crashing into one another, fists bony and curled and primed. That house was always a powder keg waiting to be lit. 

There was always a playful facade attached to the boys. Like they were pretending. Always pretending. For a long time she thought they pretended to like to fight, but she came to know better. They pretended not to like it as much as they did. They pretended they weren’t hungry for each other’s blood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

He should never have come back. She knows that now.

John uses cautious words now when he talks about Danny, like he is skirting a landmine. Kevin talks in the language of raised fists, primed for a fight long coming, and Meg –

Meg opens her front door and Danny steps through. He will be dead soon. She does not know this.

“Why did you even stay?” she asks him. “Why are you even here?” 

“I’m family. I belong here just as much as any of you.”

“But don’t you see? What you’re doing?” She thinks he looks proud. She thinks of their father; she thinks he was right. “You think there’s proof in that? Hurting the people who care about you?”

“Proof of what?”

“That they love you,” she spits it out. 

Danny doesn’t say anything at first, so she calls that a victory. “You don’t think I ever hurt?”

“Jesus Christ, it’s always about you. Don’t you get tired of all that self-pity?”

“Sure, sure, Meg. I get tired of it. But when you’re the only one who cares about yourself … ” he trails off and holds his arms open. 

She shakes her head. Rain’s begun to fall, small pieces of hail rattling off the windows. 

“No. I was on your side, the entire time. I stood up for you. I vouched for you.”

“You cut me out of the fucking will,” he sneers.

“That was Dad. I tried to stop him.”

“You tried … ”

“You think I didn’t? You think there was ever any reasoning with him where you were concerned? Where she was?”

“I know what Dad was like, you don’t need to lecture me. What I needed you to do was stop him.”

“That’s what this is about? That’s what all this is about?”

“That’s what it’s always been about! None of you have ever had my fucking back! You let Dad – ”

It’s a cyclical argument, like the eye of a storm. No, not the eye, but what they call the eyewall: the ring of thunderstorms that surround the calm weather of the eye. Lightning flashes and is followed immediately by a crack of thunder. Her head hurts and she’s yelling now. “I _let_ Dad? You think I could do anything? Dad would have cut me out of the goddamn will if it meant he could put her name in instead.”

They both freeze. Danny’s face slackens, his posture slumps, but her face goes harder.

“Meg,” he says, almost gentle. “You don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do,” she says and she is trying not to cry, which only makes her angrier. “He would’ve traded us in a fucking instant. You know that.”

“No. No, he wouldn’t have.”

“Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie when you know. You knew, same as I always knew.” She shakes her head, smiles, stretches her arms out in his same gesture of resignation. “He loved her more than me. 

He doesn’t say anything to that, so he does know. She laughs, her mouth twisting into a gruesome smile. 

“Yeah, of course you know that,” she says. “Because you do, too.”

He actually looks surprised. It’s so hard to ever catch Danny off guard; he’s the sort of person who always has all angles covered, save, perhaps, for the one straight ahead. Meg watches the way his body tenses, as if he is betraying a baser instinct. 

“Meg,” he says. 

Her voice goes thin and sharp, raised and high. “You loved her more than you loved me, too. Admit it. Say it. Fucking say it. You loved her more. You loved her more than me.”

Danny grabs her arm too tight and pulls her towards him. He takes her face in hand, his grip strong, fingers digging in on either side of her mouth. “Baby,” he says. “I see you. I see you and I love you.”

Her lower lip trembles, her jaw clenches, and she knows Danny can feel that. She knows he takes it as a sign of weakness because his face goes cold and flat. 

“Now, if we’re telling truths, I want you to admit it, Meg. You’re happy she’s dead. Say it. You were so glad she died.”

“Fuck you, Danny.” She pushes at his chest but he only holds her jaw tighter.

“Admit it. You were so fucking pleased.”

“Stop it.”

“Can you even imagine if she had lived? You, you’d still be the same desperate over-achieving whore, but you wouldn’t have stayed here, would you have? No, even you. You can’t be that pathetic.”

She shoves at him harder and he stumbles, so she pushes him again, starts pounding on his chest with her fists, backing him against the wall, entirely aware he is cooperating with her. That he wanted this. 

“You’re so fucking stupid,” she snarls, eyes wet, throat tight. “You’re a fucking idiot. You don’t know anything. I’d be gone if she had lived? I’d be gone? Jesus Christ, then her dying? Is the worst thing to ever fucking happen to me. She ruined my life. You ruined my life. You ruined my fucking life.” Her fist goes errant and catches him just under the chin, in the throat, and he wheezes, slams his own hand down around her neck, pressure hard enough to make her freeze, grip at the front of his shirt as she sways into him.

Danny’s the wrong thing to cling to, and she knows that. He looks down at her, terrifying and ominous and broken, his voice barely above a whisper when he says, “You hate me? Huh? Tell me.” 

He shakes her, his fingers digging into her skin, her own hands pulling at his shirt. “Hate me. Go on – hate me. Hate me.” 

Any cruelty is sapped from his tone as he repeats himself. Maybe that’s why she does it. She thinks that’s why she does it. It’s sad, he’s sad, everything about them is sad and disastrous, so it makes sense, that one step further. 

There never is any going back with Danny.

Meg is the one to kiss him, a deliberate and aggressive act, nothing romantic in it – love is not the same as romance, but she has always known this. She crashes her mouth into his and their teeth knock together. Her mouth goes soft at the impact, catches his bottom lip when she pulls away. 

He kisses her back, mouth open, teeth at her bottom lip. There’s nothing surprising about how Danny kisses: he is all stubborn force and might, his tongue slippery and demanding. He spins them so it’s her back against the wall. He wraps strands of her hair around his hand into a fist. He pulls and her head tips back, baring her throat. His mouth at her throat is wet; he threatens with teeth and then the threat is realized as he bites. She jerks her hips into his, and she grabs at the back of his neck. Danny bites lower, rocks into her, finds the cut of muscle above her clavicle and sucks.

She can feel him, hard against her hip. She forces his mouth back to hers, his hands on her thighs, her ass, her stomach. “I hate you,” she says, “I hate you,” his spit in her mouth. 

Danny never should have come back here.

And then, –

Meg spits in her hand before she touches his cock, and he groans preemptively, even before her wet fingers find his flesh. She drags her free hand over his mouth, tells him to shut up, but she’s already breathless too. He bites and sucks her fingers, mumbles a steady stream of nonsense as he bucks into her hand, as he works her breasts free of her bikini top – _fucking spread your legs for anything, don’t you, not too fucking good for me now, not you, so fucking good_ – and she gasps under his chin, sticks her finger deeper into her mouth, twists her hand, her knuckles dragging low against his stomach – _so fucking good_ – she parts her legs when he presses his thigh between them. Danny won’t stop talking, all the dark and terrible things he says to her, that he wants to do to her (he will only go quiet when his cock is inside of her, stunned silence shared between them and she will think _this isn’t happening_.) Meg murmurs in reply, _fuck you fuck you fuck you_ until it becomes _fuck me fuck me fuck me_ (it’s you, it’s me, you, me, you & me), one hand wet with his spit, the other with the come leaking from his cock. He refuses to give her what she wants, her skirt rucked up around her hips, her bikini bottoms still on, so she pushes herself against him, hates him for making her ask for it. 

They knock and drag their bodies to the floor, a switch flipped in him, his fingers clawing at the side of her bikini bottoms, yanking the fabric down roughly. She hears a tearing sound so she lifts her hips, their bodies awkward and clumsy with one another. Meg hits her head back against the wall and she closes her eyes. She has to keep them closed. Danny works his hand between her legs, seeking and insistent, and she’s wet, she’s been wet for it (for him for him for him fuck you fuck me fuck you fuck me), but it’s like he’s too overwhelmed to be smug about it. Instead his forehead bumps against hers and he mumbles something that sounds like her name. He knocks her knees wider apart, muscles straining at her inner thighs, and when he pushes two fingers inside of her, her body yields, arches into him. She makes a panicked, strangled sound, her eyes still closed. 

His mouth is open and soft at her temple.

“Open your fucking eyes.”

She listens. She watches him watch her. She watches him pull her hips to his, the head of his cock pressing into her, and she moans, “Fuck me,” again, even though he already is. Even though she’s fucking him. 

She’s rough as she fucks him, her knees aching against the floor, but it’s almost as if he is trying to gentle her down – his fingers in her hair, on her face, _open your fucking eyes_ – so she moans, “No,” says it again, petulant and needy. She fucks him harder and his fingers bite into her thighs as he watches her. She’s furious. There’s a terrifying desperation on his face she fears is mirrored in her own. “No,” she says, but she thinks she means, “please,” and then she is coming, sharp and sudden, as if by accident. 

He rolls them, his body heavy and warm, the wood floor hard and unforgiving under her back. His hips keep shuddering against hers, his arms wrapped tight around her, his mouth open and groaning, “Baby, baby, baby,” under her ear. She grabs his wrist and pulls his hand to her throat. Even though it’s his hand, her throat, he’s the one to make a gasping, wheezing noise. His fingers tighten and her cunt tightens around him. She thinks: this is what he wanted. He wants to hurt me. 

And here is the truth: she wants to let him.

There’s no rhythm to his hips and his skin is hot under her hands. He takes up all the room inside her. But then, he always has. Nothing’s changed, she tells herself. Nothing’s changed.

After, Danny lays flat on his back, Meg beside him, wet with the both of them between her legs. 

“Get out,” she says to the ceiling. “Get out.”

Her thighs shake as she curls into the wall, naked from the waist down. She listens as he leaves. 

He wants to ruin this family and she knows that, knows that means he wants to ruin her, and he is succeeding. She tells herself that he has put a small black piece of rot in her and that it has been growing, steadily, that it has made her hungry for destruction the same way he is always aching and wanting. She’s wrong. That piece of rot was always there.

In some families, this is called a birthright.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

Sarah is the easiest woman Danny has ever loved for two reasons. 

One: he made her up.

Two: he had to unmake her to invent her in the first place.

He loves her because he let her die. He loves her because love is easier than forgiveness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi. 

She takes Marco to dinner at John’s. Diana cooked and the fish is overdone. The conversation is, too.For as much as she loves her brother (John is her _favorite_ ), Diana is the same as him, their lives increasingly untouchable and incomprehensible to Meg. 

“You like tired,” Diana says to her in the kitchen. Meg rubs at her face, tries to laugh, carries the salad out to the table. Her right hip aches ( _Danny_ ) and her teetering wedge sandals aren’t doing her any favors. She takes a seat at the table.

She feels like she’s been scraped raw, every nerve on edge, a headache blooming behind her eyes. She drains the margarita Diana made her, too much salt on the rim. There’s a small cut on her bottom lip ( _Danny_ ) and it burns. 

“You don’t think he’s going to stay, do you?” Diana is saying and Meg jerks her head up. John is looking at her.

“I don’t know,” Meg says tightly. “What do you think, John?”

Diana rolls her eyes. “You know John when it comes to Danny: no objectivity.” 

“Let’s not talk about Danny,” Meg says. There’s a finality to her words she had not intended. Diana blinks at her, as if she is only now seeing Meg seated across from her. Like she doesn’t like what she sees: no objectivity. 

“He does seem to be doing a good job, helping your mom with the inn and stuff,” Marco says, each word a hedging bet.

“I’m so fucking tired of talking about Danny,” she snaps and her eyes water with angry tears ( _Danny_ ) and the three of them sit around John’s family’s dinner table and they stare at her and she scrapes her fork across her plate, waiting for the screech.

“Fuck Danny,” she says to her hands. “Fuck Danny.”

Danny is in their mother’s kitchen. “You’ve been a bad, bad girl,” he says. 

“What?”

Danny cocks his head to the side. Something’s burning on the stove, the stench stinging her nostrils. 

“Marco still doesn’t know?”

Meg takes a step backward; she stumbles. “About what?” 

She watches smoke begin to rise behind him, but if he notices it, he ignores it. He grins.

“About me,” he says. He steps closer. “About how you let me touch you. About how you let me fuck you. How you fucked me. How you want it, don’t you? Want it all the fucking time. He doesn’t know about that he doesn’t know about me he doesn’t know about you and what you’re made of and what lives inside you, but I know, I know, I’ve always known – ”

Meg jerks upright, the sheets damp with her sweat. She squeezes her eyes shut and breathes in deep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

When John got married, it coincided with when Meg turned twenty-one. She had been a junior at the University of Miami. He had a bachelor party weekend down in Key West, that for whatever reason – and by whomever’s lobbying – Meg was a part of. The only girl. She had been used to being the only girl. She liked being the only girl. She purposefully put herself in settings where she was just that: the only girl.

“So tell me,” Danny said to her at Fogarty’s on Duval. The spring break crowd was there, filling the bar. John should never have planned to marry in spring. He should’ve known better to pick a date during the tourist off-season. Living in a spring break haven had always made traveling anywhere else feel superfluous. A waste of money and travel. Meg never wanted to go anywhere else. Why should she? She was to graduate in a year, and it was already planned out: she would go to FSU’s law school, travel north as far as Tallahassee before returning home to work at any of the dozen small firms down in Islamorada. 

“What is it good girls drink these days?” he continued.

Meg held up the plastic cup with the swinging monkey on it and the remnants of purple-hued 151 sloshing around. “What’s this called?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She nodded, over and over, drunk already, in agreement with nothing and everything. The collar of his t-shirt was wet with sweat or spilled beer. She pressed the plastic cup to his chest and his hand covered hers. He did not take the cup. 

“This is what good girls drink,” she said and he laughed at her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the house is on fire

 

 

 

 

i.

The year Danny comes home for Thanksgiving – four years before the 45th anniversary, four years before their father dies, before he dies – Meg has to pick him up from the Islamorada police station. 

Meg waits for him out by the car. Danny won’t look at her as he approaches, but when he does, there’s something almost defiant there, mixed in amidst an unspoken apology.

He asks her if she was sleeping. She says no, rolls the window down as she drives. Humid air washes over her, hint of a chill, and she likes that, she rolls the window all the way down. Hair blows over her face, towards his. 

He asks her if she’s drunk. She lies, says no. 

Driving drunk requires a lot of the skills necessary for when driving while exhausted. Shift your gaze across the road ahead of you, never fixing on one point. Play loud music. Find fresh air. Promise yourself there’s a destination waiting for you and you will be there soon.

He says, confrontational in disguise as apologetic, “Look. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know who else, fucking John – ”

“Stop. Jesus, Danny. Just shut the fuck up. Please.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

This is what Meg has learned from Danny:

the story of _A Wrinkle In Time_ ;

how to make paella;

how long she can hold her breath, willingly and unwillingly;

how her body can betray her, how her heart can do the same, how that will hurt, each and every single time;

what it means to reside in second place, that silver is not gold;

that love is not an absolute. It can be given and it can be taken away.

Danny wasn’t the one to teach her how to lie. She learned that from their mother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

They say, when a person drowns it’s not the water that kills them but the lack of oxygen. The human brain will die after approximately six minutes without oxygen.

If water is inhaled, if it enters the airways, you will try to cough up the water or swallow it, bringing more water into the lungs. Lack of oxygen to the lungs can cause the heart to stop beating. If the heart stops beating, the flow of blood is stopped, the flow of oxygen to the brain stops.

Death results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

Danny dies. Danny’s dead. John killed Danny and now Danny is dead.

Meg stumbles up the stairs into her house. The trunk of her car is empty. 

She strips her wet clothes as she makes her way to the bathroom. Her teeth won’t stop chattering. She steps into the shower, each quick, cut-off, heaving breath echoing off the tile. She rubs her arms then wraps them around her waist, bends into the spray, crumples in on herself, doesn’t recognize the sound coming from herself when she opens her mouth and starts to cry. 

Her chest burns, the back of throat too. She curls up at the bottom of the shower, water swirling down the drain. Meg holds her breath; _one, two, three_ , she tries to count.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

Mom won’t go in the guest room. She keeps that folded toast Danny wrote clasped in her hand, in her breast pocket. She won’t let Meg read it. Meg doesn’t need to read it. 

Danny had left behind impersonal odds and ends in the guest room. There's a toothbrush still at the sink, the unwashed towels he used. A crumpled pack of cigarettes in the drawer of the bedside table, a couple cigarettes left. Meg takes one out. There’s a matchbook rolling around in the drawer too. She takes one, strikes it, lights the cigarette and inhales deep. She lays back against the pillow, the bed unmade, and studies the matchbook.

THE RAYBURN HOUSE INN 

est. 1970

Meg takes a deep drag, closes her eyes, smoke fills her lungs. She says his name out loud.

She bundles the sheets and the towels, tidies up, opens the window wide to air it out. This room does not have a view of the water, just dense green. You can’t see anything past the palms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

John wouldn’t speak at Danny’s funeral. Meg had to instead.

She will not remember what she said. She will remember –

The blank legal pad she left in bed beside her. All that was written on the page was his name. She drank more tequila. Ran out, bought more. She packed her place up. She went shopping for new clothes for the new job. She bought black dresses. She wrote his name and crossed it out, wrote his name, crossed it out. 

She drove.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

Danny came to stay with her, back when she had graduated law school and was studying for the Florida bar. She had kicked him out after two weeks. The two of them fought in the small bathroom of her small condo, all that pink and teal. A tiny gecko had found its way in and skittered over the candy-colored tile around their bare feet while Danny blamed her for whatever might come to happen to him after he left.  

At least let me pass the bar, she had said. She couldn’t help herself so she said, I”d be more use to you that way.

He had smiled instead of scowled and she knew that meant he hated her, at least for that moment – the bathroom, the loud fan to drown them out from the man she had been seeing at the time, the gecko, the storm raging outside, the hole he had left in the wall next to the sliding door, the fact that Meg was asking her brother to leave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

viii.

This is what she is going to do: she is going to drive. She will not think. She will not think: Danny. She will not think: Sarah. She will deny them all, she will not – her father, their mother, the father that was never hers, the mother she looks nothing like, who she took nothing from, the brothers who take and take and took and take and hollowed out that house, made you forget it was once a home. She won’t think: Danny. She won’t think: John killed Danny and he will not tell me why. John says, for family. John says, because he had to. John does not use concrete details he does not say motive he does not apologize and Meg will not think about this she will not think, he didn’t deserve this she will not think, he deserved worse, I deserve worse, this family deserves nothing short of hell. She will not ask John questions. She will not want to know. She will drive. Overseas Highway, Hurricane of 1935, 423 dead, three to four minutes maximum, Danny facedown in the water, Sarah facedown in the yard, their father face-first under the dirt, Danny’s face against her face, his mouth under her jaw, Danny’s name inside her mouth Danny inside her heart Danny’s body in the trunk of her car Danny’s body inside her body Danny fucking her in her house _get out, get out of my life_ she will not think, Danny is dead she will drive 127.5 miles she will not – Danny Danny Danny –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ix.

John comes by to see her. He bought her place from her, plans to rent it out to tourists. He told her it’ll still be here for her when she comes down to visit.

“Alright then,” John says when she hands the keys over to him. He knocks a fist against the kitchen countertop as if for finality and for luck.

She has her back to him. She can hear him at the door when she says, steely and low, “You made a lot of decisions without us, John.”

He stills. “What’s that?”

She looks at him over her shoulder. “I said, you made a lot of decisions without us." 

“Don’t do this, Meg. I’m tired.”

“I said,” she says, continuing, her voice getting louder, “you made your own decisions and then you made them ours.”

“All I have ever done is what was best for this family, and we both know that.”

She meets his eye. He has to know by now: there is no best for this family.

“Alright then,” she repeats.

“See you around,” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

four siblings, all raised by wolves

 

 

 

i.

“I went by,” John told her, “to see Chelsea, Chelsea O’Bannon, earlier.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Had a quick chat. I wanted to tell her that,” and the last word bled into a sigh and he ran a hand through his hair. “They found her car.” He paused, looked across the counter to Meg. “It was funny though. Seeing Danny through her eyes.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Just. That someone could love him, not because they had to, but, well. Because they wanted to.”

Meg reached for her glass but found it empty. She cradled it in her hands anyway. She couldn’t look at John so she looked at the glass.

“I took the job,” she said. “I’m going to New York.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

Now that Alec’s the only one she fucks, it’s no longer interesting. They don’t fuck in the back of her car anymore (she sold that car before she left for New York, could’ve probably gotten a better offer for it, but she took the first one she got, desperate to be rid of it) or in motels with sand stamped into the worn carpet, caught between the starchy over-washed sheets. It’s the king-sized bed at his apartment, never hers, or the one time he fucked her in her office, flush against the cool glass of the window, like the opening scene to a 90s thriller or the climactic scene of an 80s neo-noir, or any other comparable scene in an early 2000s porno. Like anyone could be watching her. 

It’s strange to go from Florida to New York, to swap the apocalyptic oppression of the dense weather that always hangs above for this: steel and concrete and cold and tight pale faces looking everywhere but at you. The world is always ending in cities like New York in the movies, but Meg knows that can’t be true. If the world is to end, it would happen where she came from. It did happen where she came from. Endings belong to places of the wild, places governed by nature and cruelty and heat, where everything manmade is forced to reckon with all that was here before them. No neat city blocks, no labeled streets, no buildings that climb and climb and reach straight up, gleaming on the days the sun dares to shine. She tells herself she doesn’t miss it, that she likes the cold, that each morning it is still a surprise when she walks out of her apartment building and is met by flakes of snow and a chill her body can never warm to. She tells Alec all this, and he just nods, as if to say, _I told you so_ , even though he never said anything at all about any of that, and her hands are cold as she clasps them in her lap, her apartment is cold when she returns home to it, her bones are cold when she wraps her arms tight around herself, alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

She is at dinner the first time she thinks she sees Danny.

She excuses herself from Alec, the assorted associates and partners dining with them.

She crashes into the bathroom, splashes cold water on her face, breathes in deep. She keeps her eyes closed. She counts only to fifteen, her hands braced against the sink, body bent, when she hears it:

“Hey, Mister.”

She starts to cry, rough, ugly sobs that make her nose run, her mascara run, and in front of her, in the mirror, is Danny.

When she turns around, there’s no one there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

Meg sees him again in her office, loitering by the window. No sky view here, just buildings. He’s slouched against the glass, dressed in the same blue flannel shirt and jeans he had been wearing in the trunk of her car.

“You’re dead,” she says.

He shrugs, smirks at her imperial tone. “Okay,” he says. He smoothes a hand down his throat, presses his fingers to his jawline. He shoves his hands in his pockets and takes a shuffling step forward and then another. “Look pretty good for a dead guy though, right?”

She ignores him, looks back down at the brief she was working on. He stands over her desk. She can feel him, as if he is just another part of herself she’s spent her life trying to forget.

“Miss me?”

“You’re dead,” she says again, voice threatening to crack. 

She meets his eye and he looks back at her.

“Yeah,” he says, compassion bleeding into something harder as his mouth sours. “But you know you’re not rid of me yet, Mister.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

“You need to stop.” She had met Kevin at the Blue Parrot before she left for New York.

“I’m fine,” she interrupted. She fiddled with her bottle of beer, peeled at the label.

“You’re not though. You’re,” he said, and then he stopped, collected himself. “You gotta let it go. Let him go. Move on. You’ve got New York. You’ve got the job. Forget all this. Forget … ” he trailed off, sighed heavy and leaned forward suddenly. “You know what I do sometimes? Fuck, all the time? I pretend it never happened. None of this. I pretend Danny came for the party, he fucked up, as always, Dad said he had to go, and he did. He left. He was never even here. He’s in Miami somewhere, fucking around – fuck that, Tampa, Panama City, drove down to Key West and kept going till he hit Cuba, fuck it, _poof_ , gone. I tell myself, Danny? All he did was leave. All he ever did was leave us. And maybe had he left, that would’ve been it, for real. For keeps. He’d be gone, fucking gone, forever. I say, this was always gonna be the final time, us as a family.” He laughed, bitter. “Dad, Sarah, Danny – look at us. We’re already fucking shot. We were never gonna be whole. And he was never gonna come back. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. There’s nothing new to miss.”

Meg nodded, didn’t trust her voice. Kevin reached and squeezed her wrist.

“Let him go.”

She smiled, wan. She waved her hand, blinked fast.

“He’s already gone.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

Danny is the easiest man she has ever loved, now that he is dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

The last Christmas Danny came home was two years ago.

Mom still had Sarah’s stocking and it was tradition each year that she would take the stocking out of storage but she wouldn’t hang it. She kept the stocking with the rest of the family’s, and she would hang all of theirs and then clutch Sarah’s first in her hand and then to her chest before she returned it to the box with the broken ornaments and old knick-knacks she had grown tired of. 

Danny came the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

“It’s good. That you came,” she said to him when they were alone. Danny looked tired, but surprisingly good.

He glanced at her sidelong before he took a long sip of the eggnog Mom had poured him.

“This is, just, awful.” He took another sip. 

“Where’ve you been?”

“As opposed to how I’ve been?”

“The questions aren’t … mutually exclusive. That could’ve been my follow-up." 

“Oh, sure. I bet it was. ‘My follow-up,’ she says, deposing me, on Christmas Eve.” 

“Don’t be a dick.”

“I was in New Orleans, for a spell.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Doing what?”

“I thought you were going to ask me how I’m doing.” 

“I’m getting there. New Orleans,” she prompted.

He shrugged. “Voodoo, beignets, got my ass beat by a jazz player and his trombone.” She didn’t say anything, so he sighed heavily. “I was doing some kitchen work, some other work you’d be in no way interested in. I really did get the shit kicked out of me by some smooth jazz motherfucker though.”

“Of course you did. And, drumroll – how are you?”

“Me? I’m beautiful, golden, in desperate need of a fucking cigarette.”

“And that’s your cue.”

He waved dramatically towards the back porch. “That is my cue.”

The following morning, Christmas would be ruined. They’d turn on each other, their father’s temper would spike, their mother would be disappointed. But that night, the four siblings sat out on the porch and drank. It was almost as if they all got along, as if a world existed where the past was merely a story invented, created outside of themselves and then given to them, paired with the command that it be obeyed. The future doesn’t have to hurt as much as the past, that was what Meg had thought that night. It was a chilly season that year, and she wore a sweater, wrapped up tight around her, as she sat with her brothers and drank the mulled wine Belle had made, and they were together, and that was the important part. Their parents slept inside the house, their children outside it, and Meg had thought: we have to remember this. We have to keep this safe.

Nothing is ever lost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

viii.

John calls. She has been in New York a month.

“John,” she says. She sits on the edge of her bed, her robe pulled tighter around her waist. “It’s late.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know it is. Sorry about that.”

“No. It’s,” she shrugs. She clears her throat. “I’ve been meaning to … I was gonna call you, and Mom, but work’s been, it’s an adjustment, and … ”

“That’s not what I’m calling about.”

“Okay. What are you calling about?”

“I think – when you can, you should probably come on down here.” He pauses. She can hear the bugs in the trees. She can hear Surf barking. If she tries hard enough she thinks she might be able to hear the waves. She does not try. “There’s someone here you should meet.”

The bugs are noisy in the trees. “Who?” she asks, but John doesn’t answer. She will not try to hear the waves. She thinks: I will not go back there. And in a way, she means it. That place is gone. She’s never missed a place more than she has missed Islamorada, and she knows, the same way she knows a great many terrible things – how long it takes for a man to drown, where her heart is located and who and what can open it – it will never be hers again. It will never be home again. Both her brothers have taken that place from her.

“John, who?” she asks again.

“Danny’s son,” he says, reluctant, as if she had crawled inside of him and physically pulled the words from him. She stills. She lets the phone slip from her grip, drop first against her shoulder, slick against her wet hair, and then down onto the bed. Her hand remains raised and she tucks her hair behind her ear. From the bed she hears John say her name, say, “Meg? Meg? You there? Meg?” She does not answer him. She looks to her right, eyes bright and wet, and her mouth opens in a savage laugh.

_Gotcha_. 

Beside her, Danny’s lips curl back to reveal teeth. He laughs, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
